President John F. Kennedy shakes hands with upon his arrival in Nashville, Tenn. on May 18, 1963. Kennedy spoke at Vanderbilt University's Dudley Field. / Jack Corn, The Tennessean

by Michael Cass, The Tennessean

by Michael Cass, The Tennessean

NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- President John F. Kennedy rode down busy streets in an open convertible when he came to Nashville 50 years ago this weekend, following a motorcade route printed in The Tennessean the day before he arrived.

And in another odd precursor to the national tragedy that would unfold six months later in Dallas, tension festered within Tennessee's Democratic leadership as Kennedy began to plant the seeds for his 1964 re-election campaign. In Tennessee and Texas, the friction involved Kennedy's vice president and former rival, Lyndon Johnson.

As Texas Democrats feuded over their own ideological differences the following November, the president was killed by a sniper who fired into his open car after the parade route was published.

"It could have happened that morning (in Nashville), no doubt about it," said John Jay Hooker, an attorney and Kennedy family friend who attended the 35th president's speech at Vanderbilt University's Dudley Field on May 18, 1963.

Looking back, Hooker and other people who were there remember a day free of such worries, a day to celebrate an inspiring chief executive who soon would celebrate his 46th birthday.

No one imagined it would be his last.

"He had the facility to convince you that one man can make a difference and every man should try," Hooker said. "That has been the guiding light of my life."

Excitement in the city

When Kennedy stepped off Air Force One at 10:35 a.m. that Saturday, he became the first president to make an official visit to Nashville since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934.

Nashville was ready.

Thousands of people showed up at the airport. Many more lined the parade route. Banners and signs proclaimed, "One Good Term Deserves Another" and "All the Way with JFK and TVA."

Forty high school bands fell in behind the president's motorcade on the way to Vanderbilt. Everyone had a chance to see Kennedy standing up in his 1962 Lincoln Continental as the Secret Service, assisted by local police, led the way.

Before Kennedy arrived, The Tennessean reported that the car's bubble top had been covered the previous day.

"But the cover and the bubble will be removed today - unless it rains - so the President can stand during the motorcade and greet the crowd."

It didn't rain. About 33,000 people heard the speech at Vanderbilt's football stadium under "a searing May sun," reporter Julie Hollabaugh wrote.

"Everybody was just sort of awed to be around him," said Atlanta lawyer Tom Abernathy, who, as president of the Vanderbilt Student Association, earned a moment with Kennedy that was captured in a newspaper photo.

George Barrett, a civil rights attorney, was close to Richard Fulton, who was serving his first term as Nashville's congressman and flew home from Washington, D.C., with the president. Barrett said Fulton's office sent out 25,000 to 30,000 postcards urging voters in his district to attend.

"We decided to invite everybody," Barrett said.

Beverly Briley, mayor of the newly formed Metro government, had encouraged city employees to attend - a move hard to imagine in today's political climate. He later estimated that 200,000 people had seen Kennedy during the three-hour, seven-minute visit.

Tensions, haunting words

Kennedy had lost Tennessee to Republican Richard Nixon by 7 percentage points and more than 75,000 votes in 1960, when he defeated Nixon by less than one-fifth of a point nationally.

Kennedy hoped voters would change their minds in 1964. But when he arrived here, some of the state's top Democrats were at odds.

Sen. Albert Gore and Gov. Frank Clement were Kennedy men, but former Gov. Buford Ellington was much closer to Vice President Johnson, who had competed against Kennedy for the Democratic nomination. There was political jostling over who would sit where on the presidential platform, said John Seigenthaler, chairman emeritus of The Tennessean and the newspaper's editor in 1963.

But the "little undercurrent of tension" never surfaced while Kennedy was here, Seigenthaler said.

"You would have thought Albert Gore and Buford Ellington were long-lost cousins. It really was a moment of political unity at a time when there was a sharp split inside Democratic politics in Tennessee."

As the elected officials and other dignitaries sat behind him, Kennedy gave a 19-minute speech about education, human rights and the responsibilities of citizenship.

"In these moments of tragic disorder, a special burden rests on the educated men and women of our country to reject the temptations of prejudice and violence and to reaffirm the values of freedom and law on which our free society depends."

Kennedy also made a careful nod to the civil rights movement, noting that the nation was "engaged in a continuing debate about the rights of a portion of its citizens." He said that debate would continue until "all Americans enjoy equal opportunity and liberty under law."

When Kennedy was finished, he got back in his car. But then he noticed something, Seigenthaler said. A group of veterans, patients at the Veterans Affairs hospital, were sitting in wheelchairs on the field.

After passing the first patient, Kennedy told his driver to stop. Then he got out of the car, shook hands with many of the veterans and saluted the rest. Then it was time to drive to the governor's mansion for lunch.

Clement's son Bob, who was a 19-year-old University of Tennessee student, said grace before his father, the president and the other guests ate a lunch of ham, chicken, asparagus and strawberry shortcake.

Bob Clement, who was elected to Congress 25 years later, remembers a private conversation between his father and Kennedy before the meal. The president asked the 42-year-old governor, who held office from 1953 to 1959 but had to sit out a term before returning in 1963, how it felt to be "out of office at such a young age."

When Clement replied, "Jack, it's hell," the two men shared a laugh.

Later, after the plates had been cleaned, Gov. Clement said what seemed like a routine farewell to the president: "We wish you a safe journey home and hope you return soon."

Living in the moment

The Associated Press reported that Kennedy's food at the governor's mansion was screened before he ate it. The story added, "All this security is important for the President's safety, but it doesn't allow him to get close to the people as he did in the earlier visits."

But, as his visit with the veterans at Dudley Field showed, that wasn't entirely true. Kennedy slipped free of his security detail to shake hands with spectators several times.

The president wasn't worried about his safety, friends said.

"There was never any thought that he was in danger," said Seigenthaler, who had worked in the president's administration in 1961 and 1962 as a top assistant to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. "Everybody thought it was wonderful that you could have the president here and see him and maybe even, if you're close enough, shake hands with him. And then, so soon after that, Dallas comes. And from that point on, presidential security is the first issue every time (the president) goes out."

Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in California in 1968, less than three months after he, too, spoke at Vanderbilt as a presidential candidate. Hooker, who lived with the younger Kennedy brother and his family for six months in 1961, said the Kennedys refused to shrink from the possibility of dying when it was time to embrace the public.

John F. Kennedy "recognized that he had a short lease, that the time here for him could end at any moment," Hooker said. "And so he lived in the moment, not worried about the past or worried about the future, and he had that energy that comes from getting you in the moment with him."

'If this is a joke, it's not funny'

On Nov. 22, 1963, Seigenthaler was sitting in his newspaper office when an Associated Press newsman came in with a bulletin reporting that the president had been shot in Dallas.

"I read it, and I didn't believe it. And I told him, 'If this is a joke, it's not funny.' And he burst into tears, and he said, 'I'm sorry, it's not a joke. It's true.' "

Seigenthaler said he believes Kennedy would have been re-elected if he had lived to face Republican nominee Barry Goldwater in 1964.

"We'll never know how good his presidency could have been. But I think that in his second term he would have had a chance to do even greater things than he had done."